Mark emails as Read or Unread in Windows Mail + mark all messages as Read/Unread

As you learned in a previous tutorial, you can customize how quickly Windows Mail automatically marks an unread email as read; in this tutorial, we will show you how to manually mark one or more email messages as read, or unread, and how you can mark as read or unread all emails inside a particular folder.

Manually mark an email message as read or unread in Windows Mail

Start by opening Windows Mail - any folder will do, as long as it contains several email messages (useful for the end of this tutorial):

• When the folder and its emails has loaded, right-click on an email already marked as read.
• From the context menu, choose "Mark as Unread"
• Windows Mail will then display this message as unread, and show it in bold text.
• The next time you select that email, it will, as normal and expected, be automatically marked as read after the period you currently have set in Windows Mail to wait before marking an email message as read. In other words, manually marking an email as unread will not give it a permanent state of "unread-ness"!
• It may not seem very useful to be able to mark an individual email as read, since it becomes that way automatically after a few seconds, but keep in mind that (1) some users have configured Windows Mail to automatically mark emails as read only after a very long time period, and (2) that the "Mark as Read" command we're about to see can be used on an entire group of unread emails!
• So, for illustration purposes, right-click on the email you just marked as unread, and choose "Mark as Read" from the menu that opens.
• Windows Mail Tip: you can also change the Read / Unread status of the currently selected email(s) by going through the Edit menu, and choosing the Mark as Read / Mark as Unread menu item. (And notice that "Mark as Read" has its dedicated keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Q, which would be applied on the set of selected messages.)

Now that we've seen how you can work with an individual email message, let's switch to entire folders of emails, inbox or otherwise.

Mark all messages in an email folder as Read or Unread

Windows Mail lets you apply the Read / Unread status not just to single messages, but to entire folders:

• Open the email folder whose messages you want to mark as Unread (for example)
• Click on the Edit menu, and choose "Select All" - you can also use the Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut.
• When all emails in the folder are selected, right-click on any of them, and choose "Mark as Unread" (equivalently, go through the Edit menu as shown earlier).
• All your folder is now marked as unread!
• Of course, just use the "Mark as Read" command if you want instead to mark that folder's messages as Read.

Tip: if you want to mark an entire email folder's messages as Read, you can also use the Ctrl+Q keyboard shortcut, which works there too - that ends up quite a bit faster too!